So many celebrations….even the transparency of watercolors

February 3, 2013

This weekend starts a small avalanche of small celebrations: Ground Hog’s Day, Super Bowl, Chinese New Year, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day. Busy busy busy. The realization of this came to me in the form of a small gift ofa great treasury on Etsy entitled “February“, which includes three of these events, and which featured of my “Valentine 1” small painting. I thought it was so cool to combine the three holidays in the collection, it was the first time I’d seen them put together in any sort of way. Many thanks to Cindi Ressler for including me in her very fun treasury.

That painting of hearts that she included, along with the other ones I’ve done recently have ended up being really fun explorations in the quality of transparency (and not) that watercolors can produce. So I decided to try another simply shape, for fun, one of my favorite shapes, the star.

What I’m enjoying in this piece is that the two white stars, and the background as well, are not painted in. In watercolors, generally any white in a painting is the paper that’s been left untouched. Its one of the great, fun, confusing conundrums of this medium. Since the paints are intrinsically transparent, there’s no white paint to use to cover something up. Because white when it is transparent, is, well, transparent. So there’s a bit of trompe l’oeil going on, where the white areas are negative space, created by the colored paint that surrounds them. And they look solid! These paintings are little celebrations of the transparency of watercolors. I like it. Let me know what you think.

You can find all the paintings posted in this blog available to purchase via my shop on Etsy. Have you looked there yet?

One Response to “So many celebrations….even the transparency of watercolors”

Welcome

Thank you for visiting my artwork blog. Here I post my Piccolo Paintings: original, small-format watercolors, typically under 12 inches, as they come Fresh Off My Drawing table, and share a little bit about the inspiration for each piece.